Nick Johnson's article was a shallow piece of criticism.
I agree the team lacks tact and communication skills, but if thats the worst and if you see what they have achieved and the partnerships they have, its mind boggling.

From my view, having an opensource project and be actively trying to "protect" it via purposeful bugs while allowing people to buy into the project with outside funds is at best negligent and at worst nefarious. That, coupled with the aforementioned reactions to the MIT team is already a non-starter for me.

The icing for me is the foggy mentions ternary and the shroud of secrecy RE: JINN to dangle in front.

Taking these new partnerships off the table momentarily, as I have read some critics saying the level of partnership integrations have been oversold to the public, what do you think they have achieved that is mind-boggling?

I do think the premise of an IoT based crypto asset is a possible breakthrough, just the team doesn't instill confidence for me to hold long term and I'm not interested in flipping alts when compared to just holding other assets.

Seems like every time Ripple makes a deal with this bank or that one they all profit while the price barely moves or moves a little then comes right back down. I recently dumped it at 25 cents for more IOTA and am loving life.

I almost bought in during the ICO in November. I was sold on the idea, but didn't really have fiat to invest without selling BTC/ETH, which I didn't want to do. Considering buying in at some point still

A token that is designed for banks to pass between each other to settle their balance sheets is not worth anything to hold. Where's the demand going to come from to drive the price up? One bank buys it, then transfers (sells) it to another bank, who the next day transfers (sells) it to another bank, and so on in a way that largely nets out. No influx of new buyers driving up demand.

Store of value use is the most bullish scenario for a coin's price, not being a great currency. Currencies are placeholders designed to be held as little as possible, not as much as possible.

A token that is designed for banks to pass between each other to settle their balance sheets is not worth anything to hold. Where's the demand going to come from to drive the price up? One bank buys it, then transfers (sells) it to another bank, who the next day transfers (sells) it to another bank, and so on in a way that largely nets out. No influx of new buyers driving up demand.

Store of value use is the most bullish scenario for a coin's price, not being a great currency. Currencies are placeholders designed to be held as little as possible, not as much as possible.

If the banks are using these tokens as intended for international settlements won't they need to hold large quantities or smaller quantities at large per token values in order to ensure liquidity?

A token that is designed for banks to pass between each other to settle their balance sheets is not worth anything to hold. Where's the demand going to come from to drive the price up? One bank buys it, then transfers (sells) it to another bank, who the next day transfers (sells) it to another bank, and so on in a way that largely nets out. No influx of new buyers driving up demand.

Store of value use is the most bullish scenario for a coin's price, not being a great currency. Currencies are placeholders designed to be held as little as possible, not as much as possible.

I'm no expert and have a bad memory but when I researched it
- A little bit of XRP gets destroyed with each transaction
- Price of XRP needs to be increased to ~ $20 for it to be a sustainable solution for banks to use (price is too low for it to work in large scale).
- XRP saves banks over 60% in costs if they use xrp with ripple technology.
- Ripple are controlling the prices right now, they dont want volatility while making deals with banks.

A lot of people downloading coinbase, (no 1 app in the app store) seeing they cannot get / afford bitcoin or it will take a week and buying LTC instead.

About 2 days I wanted to move money from exchange to exchange, Litecoin made the most sense as there was a delay on BTC and the fees got too big.

I am having a lot of trouble with Kraken Exchange and I would not set up an account with them FWIW

Spoiler:

The Kraken website is absolute garbage, keeps timing out, I have FIAT sitting there I wanted to use but the site keeps giving errors/timing out, a lot of people are having these issues. I have been trying all day

Seems like every time Ripple makes a deal with this bank or that one they all profit while the price barely moves or moves a little then comes right back down. I recently dumped it at 25 cents for more IOTA and am loving life.

No idea, but eth/ltc seem to be pumping whenever btc dumps. Was tempted to sell BTC last night to buy up cheap eth/ltc. Now I'm tempted to do the opposite. Will probably just hold though. Seems better than almost blindly guessing